Merchuesday

The new NP.COMic should be ready fairly soon, which means the door in closing on the first competition to direct the making of your very own NP.COMic. For every $5 donation you get to have your name placed in the hat once. This past week we got another $10 donation from Bryan (he now has 4 chances to win) and also $20 from Ben. These two guys are Gods among men and their support is HUGELY appreciated. If you want to get your name in for that draw, better hurry…

On the Amazon side of things, I will never recommend anything as highly as I recommend…

Straight off the bat, please remember that you can use that link to navigate to ANY Amazon item and it will still count as a referral for us. Now then…

I watch a lot of TV. I watch a lot of films. I listen to a lot of music. I’m passionate about all those things but NOTHING comes close to matching the achievement of The Wire. The greatest show…that hardly anybody saw. Hell, even I only caught on after 3 seasons had gone. A few episodes in I wasn’t overly impressed but half way through the first season something clicked and by the time the masterpieces that are season 3 and 4 came around, my jaw was rooted to the floor.

Take it away critics…

“This is TV as great modern literature, a shattering and heartbreaking urban epic about a city (Baltimore) rotting from within.” – TV Guide

“A critic for this paper once declared “The Wire” “the greatest dramatic series ever produced for television” and as the fourth season gets under way Sunday night, there’s no reason to quibble with that assessment.” – Newsday

“The breadth and ambition of “The Wire” are unrivaled and that taken cumulatively over the course of a season — any season — it’s an astonishing display of writing, acting and storytelling that must be considered alongside the best literature and filmmaking in the modern era.” – San Francisco Chronicle

“A vibrant, masterful work of art, HBO’s novelistic urban saga The Wire is the best show on television.” – LA Weekly

“They have done what many well-intentioned socially minded writers have tried and failed at: written a story that is about social systems, in all their complexity, yet made it human, funny and most important of all, rivetingly entertaining.” – Time

“‘The Wire’ is as complex a picaresque as one is likely to find this side of Dickens.” – Pittsburgh Post

“Local stories can have more poetry than grand ones; that is the genius of The Wire. It’s not what happens to the characters, or the societal trends the script explores, that matter so much as the authentic and precise way in which events are represented.” – Wall Street Journal

“When television history is written, little else will rival “The Wire,” a series of such extraordinary depth and ambition that it is, perhaps inevitably, savored only by an appreciative few.” – Variety